The present invention relates to an apparatus for shaping a material of a food into a specific shape and to hardness and taste which would be achievable with hand-shaping or hand-rolling. More particularly, the present invention relates to a mechanism for supplying a material of a food, which is to be provided with a desired shape, by each predetermined amount and after processing it to predetermined hardness.
Various foodstuffs are known which are prepared by handshaping predetermined amounts of boiled rice, meat or like material into desired shapes. Typical of such foodstuffs are sushi, hamburger steak and croquette. The process relying on manual work is not suitable for mass production due to the need for many workers and the poor yield. Nevertheless, there is a growing demand for such processed foods in parallel with the recent worldwide change of diet. This demand cannot be readily met, however, due to the ever increasing labor costs.
Sushi, for example, has come to win popularity especially in the dietary aspect. Sushi is a hand-rolled block of rice which should be constant both in amount and in shape. Hand-rolling, however, cannot avoid irregularity in shape or size or yield a large number of blocks at a time. Only the qualified persons with a long time of experience and skillful with their fingers can roll rice to a constant size at a commercially acceptable rate. Such persons are rare today and, if employed, would make the business ill-paid due to the prohibitive wages. Thus, mechanical means would prove quite convenient if realized to shape rice into blocks of sushi as hard and tasty as skillful hand-rolling. However, hardly any propositions have heretofore been made on such a type of food shaping apparatuses. A food shaping method is known which uses a mold of wood provided with recesses complementary in shape to blocks of sushi and prepares sushi by filling the recesses with rice and compressing it strongly from above. Yet, the resulting sushi is usually too hard and cannot attain the taste which is particular to hand-rolling. Should the compression force applied to the rice be cut down in order to adjust the hardness, the grains would fall off the resulting block putting the block out of shape.
In light of the above, I have already proposed an improved food shaping arrangement as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,460,611 issued July 17, 1984 and entitled "METHOD OF SHAPING FOOD". The disclosed arrangement is such that a material of a food is once loosened and scraped by a material feeding mechanism, then progressively compressed to a state easy to roll into a predetermined shape, and then transferred to a shaping mechanism to provide a foodstuff having a desired configuration. The material feeding mechanism comprises a plurality of plates located one behind the other and to face each other at a predetermined spacing, a plurality of pairs of rollers journalled to laterally opposite sides of the plates with a spacing which progressively decreases from a top pair down to a bottom pair, and a pair of feed belts for feeding downward the loosened and scraped material while being progressively compressed therebetween. The belts are passed over the rollers on the respective sides of the pairs and movable in opposite directions to each other. That is, the loosened and scraped material is compressed little by little while being guided by the belts before it is transferred to the shaping mechanism. The present invention constitutes an improvement over or a modification to such a material feeding mechanism in which the feed belts are omitted and, instead, a plurality of vanes are provided on the outer periphery of each of the rollers. The vanes are rotatable together with their associated rollers to progressively compress a material while guiding it.